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Achieving Depth or Dimension and Recognizing Values

For a beginner it can be difficult to isolate or distinguish values from each other, some find it difficult to make distinctions between the various middle values and others consistently create works that are either unintentionally high key or low key. It is usually easier to determine distinctions between values with neutrals or an individual color, but it can be much harder when there are a combination of colors. Of course if your intention is to have a limited value range that is fine, but if you want to accomplish full contrast in your work, you'll need to be able to see and apply a range of light, medium and dark values.

To render dimension and to create interest in your work, you will need to learn to use a range of values. Every pencil color can be lightened or darkened to create a range of values, some colors have more of a range than others and color mixing can be employed to achieve a good range.

A good way to begin to learn to distinguish values from each other is to make a gray value scale. Start with different shades and tints of gray, begin with either black and make progressive steps towards white or you could start with white and move gradually to black. After doing a gray scale, you can experiment making value scales with various pencil colors.

Make a gray scale showing a range of at least eight values:

• On good quality white paper, with a graphite pencil and ruler, draw a series half inch squares
• Use any artist grade black and white pencils making shades and tints of gray - or
  use Prismacolor's White (PC938), Cool Grey's 10% (PC1059), 20% (PC1060), 30% (PC1061), 50% (PC1063), 70% (PC1065), 90% (PC1067) and Black (PC935)
• Start with a full saturated black, the darkest value and gradually work towards white in at least 8 steps, it might take a few tries, but keep at it till you get some distinguishable steps between values
• Keep a note book handy for making notes
• Once you are done, you could put this up on your studio wall or keep it handy on your desk as you could use this for a value finder while drawing and coloring

Values Affect Other Surrounding Values

The goal in the above exercise is to get even steps or intervals and gradual changes in a gray value scale, though sometimes in your art work you may want either gradual even changes or instead, rather stronger varied contrasts. The idea is to create interest, to capture the attention of the viewer and to make interesting value contrasts.

Examine this example, note that your eyes are pulled towards the area with greatest contrast, where the darkest value appears. However, nothing really stands out in this example, there is little to no value contrast in most areas - it is especially difficult to distinguish between the leaf and the background for the most part.


In these two examples, there is a vast value contrast between the leaves and their backgrounds. When aiming for value contrast, this does not always relate to only the background and foreground objects, this relates to the entire piece as a whole. As in this instance, even though there is an effective contrast between the leaves and the background, you also have to determine if there are enough varying values within the leaves themselves.

Defining Tints, Tones and Shades,
Apart from the Other Aspects of Color

So far we have learned that:

• Each color has a name = hue
• It is either light or dark = value

Later we will see that:

• Colors are either warm or cool = temperature
• Either bright or dull = intensity

But first, this is the difference between a tint, a tone and a shade:

• Color plus black added = shade
• Color plus gray added = tone
• Color plus white added = tint

Pick a hue and modify it with black, gray and white:

• On good quality white paper, with a graphite pencil and ruler, draw a series half inch squares, three rows of three squares
• In the first row, color in the first square using the hue you picked, color in the second with black and mix the third square with the hue plus black, not necessarily in equal amounts - use less black
• Do the same for the second row but use gray and mix the third square with equal amounts of the hue plus gray, and then the third row mix with white, but use a very small amount of the color first and add white on top
• Keep a note book handy for making notes

There are more interesting ways to modify colors with colored pencils than just adding black, gray or white - this will be explored further on other pages. This example to the left shows how colors are modified when you add the hues 'complement' producing a more interesting 'gray' than you might get by creating a tone with a gray pencil. Creating dark values with complements will make a piece much livelier and give more depth.

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